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In the formative years of the Internet, researchers collaboratively connected computing systems with a goal of sharing research and computing resources. The model process with which they created the Internet and its forefather, the ARPANET, was echoed in early social media platforms, where creative computer scientists, artists, writers, musicians educators explored the promise of computer-based platforms to bring together communities of interest in what would be called “cyberspace.” With a focus on the arts and humanities, this introduction traces the development of social media affordances in applications such as email, mailing lists, BBSs, the Community Memory, PLATO, Usenet, mail art, telematic art, and video communication. The author outlines the early social media platforms documented in each chapter in this book and summarizes how the book's epilogues both explore differences between early and contemporary social media and look to the future of the arts in social media.

The early days of social media saw tremendous optimism about the transformations that connecting people via networked computers would bring. This chapter, the book’s epilogue, analyses the nostalgia that permeates the preceding chapters, in which the pioneers of the field write with nostalgia for creative freedom, the pre-commercial internet and the hopeful time when people believed that computing would change humanity for the better. The world of dial-up modems and floppy disks and ASCII bulletin board systems seems very long ago. But the ideals of that time, in spite of their naiveté, indeed because of it, are very valuable. Untainted by cynicism or corrupted by practicalities, they remind us of what the social net ought to be; they remind of the direction to head in, even if we will not quite get there. By inculcating ideals into mythic origin stories, nostalgia weaves them into a culture: we create the past that we want to live up to.

In the early Internet, art history crossed the path of media history and both disciplines conveyed characteristics of each other. Net (based) art did not regain the utopian potential of art, but its social, aesthetic and conceptual approach referenced the future role of digital communication. This chapter documents and examines the role of the art network THE THING in early digital communication and art practice and how it anticipated the future potential to communicate, distribute, and produce. Including the theory and practice that informed the founding of THE THING, as well as an interview with THE THING founder, Wolfgang Staehle, and a concluding timeline of THE THING's history, this chapter also emphasizes how THE THING was both playful and far ahead of its time.

Community Memory was the first public-access social media system, opening without advance notice on August 8, 1973 in Berkeley, California. Designed and programmed by members of a nonprofit company established to bring the power of computers to the counterculture, it ran on a mainframe computer and was well received by those who tried it. This chapter discusses the history of the project, contributions of some of its members, and ways in which it succeeded and ultimately failed to sustain itself. Pre-dating the personal computer, it was designed to provide terminals that nucleated neighborhood information-exchange points. Community Memory spun out from its parent organization, Resource One, Inc. to form its own nonprofit -- The Community Memory Project -- in 1977. The design underwent three generations, culminating in a network of text-based browsers running on basic IBM PCs accessing a Unix server. It was never connected to the Internet, and closed in 1992.

System X was an Australian-based dial up BBS, where users created a community of interest with both a variety of text-based conversations and a virtual gallery of images and sound that invited visual and sound artists and musicians to share work and collaborate. System X also sought to originate critical thought about information storage and control, data networks, and art practice in this media. Importantly, it provided a context for community members to upload their own content and to share that content not only with a Sydney-based community, but also with the growing international community. In an interview with Founding Sysop Scot McPhee, this chapter documents the roots of System X in the Sydney electronic music community; System X's role as an art project; the importance of uploading, downloading, manipulating and re-uploading music and images; the user community; the audience; and System X's legacy in the Australian digital arts community.

This essay revisits the online defense that took place in LinguaMOO in July 1995, tying it to theories and current practice of social media. In doing so, it situates MOOs in a historical, cultural context as an early form of participatory media related to social media environments prevalent today and establishes that popular social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, are not new but, rather, are part of an evolution of technologies that foster the human impetus to connect with one another across any mode of communication.

The history of social media has been marked by arguments over two central issues: markers of identity and degrees of participation. The battle over identity has largely focused on the legitimacy of experimenting with personal and social identity through pseudonymous ‘avatars’. The argument over agency has centered on whether participants should be tightly corralled or given full programming power to change the structures of social media itself. These issues are linked through widespread distrust of pseudonymous agency and the suspicion -- fueled by recent controversies over ‘trolling’ -- that people will tend to participate disruptively, and that such disruptions are necessarily problematic. In this chapter, the author argues for a different view, suggesting that artists have led the way in demonstrating the creative potential of pseudonymous agency in social media. Among the fruits of deep participation in social media are new ways of telling stories, understanding identity itself, and engaging with improvisation as a central rather than peripheral creative activity.

The use of digital computers to facilitate social interaction has not eclipsed the uses for which they were invented, but it often seems that way. That use requires an ability to network computers to one another, a capability that took several decades after the computer's invention to be realized. The Internet, which emerged out of military-sponsored research done in the 1970s, enabled the creation of sophisticated forms of social interaction. But the personal computer phenomenon was evolving in a parallel universe, with little communication between the two camps. This chapter argues that important first steps toward social media were taken in the arena of the personal computer, which also emerged in the 1970s, but from a different direction. Using devices to connect PCs to the telephone network, and developing so-called “bulletin board” software, personal computer enthusiasts created a framework on which the current Internet-based social world resides.

Humanist is an online, international seminar on digital humanities that was set up in 1987 by Willard McCarty. Since its inception, it has taken the form of an electronic mailing list and, within the context of the history of computing in the humanities, can be viewed as a proto-social media platform. Newer and slicker social media and crowd-driven platforms may have come (and, in some cases, gone) but Humanist has endured. Indeed, it arguably remains digital humanities’ most vital locus of questioning, imagining and reflecting on and about itself and its many interdisciplinary intersections. In this paper, the author discusses conversations conducted via Humanist in its inaugural year in order to identify and analyze references to disciplinary identity. After focusing on the contradictions that emerge, she reflects on what they might reveal about longer-term dynamics of Digital Humanities’ disciplinary formation and emphasizes the value of Humanist archives in such research.

Reprinted from legendary cyberspace pioneer Howard Rheingold's classic, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, “Daily Life in Cyberspace: How the Computerized Counterculture Built a New Kind of Place” situates the reader in the context of social media before the World Wide Web. Rheingold narrates how he became involved in The WELL community; details community and personalities on The WELL; and documents user experience with the WELL's conferencing system, including how conversations are created and organized and how social media compares to face to face dialog. Rheingold also explores social media-based dialog in terms of reciprocity; “elegantly presented knowledge”; the tradition of conversation in the Athenian agora; and the value of freedom of expression. Introduced by Judy Malloy.

Usenet's alt.hypertext newsgroup was a “place” for the discussion of hypertext. alt.hypertext hosted discussion of hypertext in general -- its possibilities and promise. Announcements of meetings and systems were frequent. Some of the discussion was of how to best use and develop what were becoming dominant conventions of hypertextual documents. The purpose of alt.hypertext came from the loose community of people who regularly posted there. Presumably alt.hypertext was chosen for the announcement of the WWW, and later the Mosaic browser, because its community was recognized as the most likely to understand and appreciate the importance and potential of the nascent WWW.

An early Internet developer takes a personal look back at the 1990 start-up of one of the early social networks, Echo. Horn discusses the challenges she faced building an online community at a time when if people had even heard of the Internet, they thought it was something to do with computers and only of interest to socially challenged geeks. She talks about coming up with ways to deal with all the problems that continue to plague the Internet today: trolls, harassment, bullying, basically all the evils of society. Horn also covers how she got women online when the Internet was 90% male, or large institutions, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, when talk on the net was mostly tech.

In the early 1970s, two decades before the World Wide Web came on the scene, the PLATO system pioneered online discussion forums and message boards, email, chat rooms, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer games, leading to the spontaneous emergence of the world's first online community. David R. Woolley, one of the creators of PLATO's social media features, describes this vibrant but unplanned community, and chronicles the development of the software that unexpectedly gave rise to it on a system that was intended primarily for computer-based education.

The Minitel (French videotex system) is often considered as a “pre-Internet” platform and the art that was created with it as belonging to “network art” and/or “collaborative” practices on a “social media” avant la lettre. In which respect is this true? This article provides an initial map and a typology of minitel-based creative practice by identifying works and documenting its context as it happened in France, compared to other countries. With detailed descriptions of selected works and of the ART ACCES online magazine-gallery project, it proposes an analysis that will be compared to and confront net art, new media art, and current trends in e-publishing.

For a decade before the Internet, members of the literary performance group Invisible Seattle pioneered the delights of creativity in social media on their Bulletin Board System (BBS) IN.S.OMNIA. The invisibles conducted a series of rigorous (and often hilarious) literary experiments, asking whether or not this disembodied text could support complex fictions, prose and poetry modes, as well as philosophic inquiry, exploring in microcosm the multi-vocal modes now common. The Invisibles discussed writing practices freed from paper-and-ink with writers such as Jacques Derrida and Harry Mathews. The essay captures the song of the modem -- the flavor of collaboration on the BBS platform -- and connects IN.S.OMNIA to netprov (networked improv narrative) and other contemporary practices.

Initiated by Carl Loeffler, Director of the San Francisco artspace La Mamelle/Art Com, who had been working on artists' telecommunications projects since the 1977 Send/Receive Project, Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) was implemented on The WELL by artist Fred Truck in the Spring of 1986. Loeffler's vision was to create an online environment for contemporary art that included electronic publication of art journals; an art-centered conferencing system; and interactive publication of computer-mediated artworks and electronic literature. How Loeffler and Truck began a collaboration that resulted in an historic social media platform; how ACEN brought artists online; published text art and electronic literature, including John Cage‘s First Meeting of the Satie Society and Judy Malloy's Uncle Roger; and mounted a travelling exhibition of artists software, is detailed in this interview with Fred Truck -- with the participation of Anna Couey, who began editing Art Com Magazine online in 1990.

Over the years, “community networking” has evolved and contributed toward what has become known as “social media,” with many exciting and novel ways we can all be interconnected. The author relates how she followed a vision for community networking and how, as the Internet was becoming a public medium, she felt a calling to do all that she could so that everyone – regardless of their educational background, income level, employment status, ethnicity, gender or any other “classification” – could have the same opportunity to learn about and shape and benefit from this emerging technology. The paper details how she worked with people from communities across Colorado (e.g., Telluride, Boulder, Southern Ute Tribe) to develop innovative community applications of the then-nascent Internet technology, how participants shared what they learned with people from other communities, and how she eventually co-led the creation of an international Association for Community Networking.

Beginning in 1992, Arts Wire, a program of the New York Foundation for the Arts, was a social media platform and Internet presence provider, that provided access to news, information, and dialogue on the social, economic, philosophical, intellectual, and political conditions affecting the arts and artists. Initially led by Anne Focke and then by poet, Joe Matuzak, Arts Wire participants included individual artists, arts administrators, arts organizations and funders. This chapter focuses on Arts Wire's social media aspects, such as discussion and projects, including among others: AIDSwire, an online AIDS information resource; the online component of the Fourth National Black Writers Conference; the Native Arts Network Association; ProjectArtNet that brought children from immigrant neighborhoods online to create a community history; NewMusNet, a virtual place for experimental music; and Interactive, an online laboratory for interactive art. It also documents the history of the e-newsletter, Arts Wire Current (later NYFA Current).

Since meeting in 1975, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz focused their collaborative art work on developing new and alternative structures for video as an interactive communication form and on interactive new media and community-centered social media. With participation by media art and politics theorist Gene Youngblood, this historic conversation follows the work of Galloway and Rabinowitz, beginning with their meeting in Paris and including Satellite Arts Project (1977), Hole-In-Space (1980), and the birth of the Electronic Café during the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics.